Illusions With Abilities

Ok so I have this hero with two abilities:

The first creates an illusion of the target directly behind the target. Damage taken/dealt is adjusted as levels go up. Simple ability.

The second is a little more complicated. It buffs a unit with 100% evasion for the next x hits where x changes depending on the level of the ability. I got this one working effectively using lots of arrays so I can run instances of it at the same time on different units, and used Vexorian's disable-spellbook-passive trick to get the evasion to not show up. It works beautifully.

The problem is this hero is supposed to use these abilities in tandem to create an illusion to fight his opponent, then buff it so it can take some hits. This doesn't work for the simple reason of illusions can't have new abilities so I cannot give them evasion. What should I do to get these abilities cooperating with each other?

Make the evasion with triggers, that or the illusion effect

Well I tried making the evasion with triggers but it didn't work out too well. That's why I switched to using an invisible passive. Basically what I did is make a trigger that goes off whenever a unit with the associated buff is attacked, and then ordered the attacking unit to stop, play their attack animation, then attack again. Somebody on the forum posted this and said it worked. What ended up happening for me though was the attacking unit would "attack" way too fast and 10 misses would go off in the span of a second or two. Am I even on the right track here?

And sorry if it's a stupid question but what do you mean by illusion effect? Do you mean emulate an illusion by creating a real unit with blue tinting, modified damage taken/dealt and a trigger removing it right before it dies? I thought of this but I couldn't think of what to use for the damage adjustments (berserk comes to mind for damage taken, but I don't know what to do for damage dealt).

try:

Make evasion give a buff, this will determine if he has evasion. Put your code in the then part to try & simulate evasion mabey?

Thanks for the help but I think I've decided to go with the fake illusions, because then I can tint them gray rather than blue (this fits the hero's shadow theme more). Some help on how to make the illusion's damage modifiers work would be greatly appreciated. I've thought about reducing damage through cripple or something like that but the problem is I don't want the negative damage modifier showing up. I just want them to deal less damage.

I have an idea on how to do the evasion on regular illusions. Just give them the buff and create a dummy unit with a 100% evasion which you move along the buffed unit with a periodic trigger. The dummy unit should have no model, making it unselectable. Then, whenever the buffed unit is attacked, order the attacker to attack the corresponding dummy unit instead. Whenever a dummy unit is attacked, decrease it's custom value by 1 and when it reaches 0, remove the dummy unit and remove the buff from the corresponding buffed unit.

There are only two bad sides to this I can think of, illusions would still be blue (but you can't grey-tint them anyway because of the way tinting works, you can black-tint them at best), and when the dummy is killed, the units that were attacking it would become idle and choose a new target automatically, which might not be the unit they were originally attacking.


Also, the system with detecting attacks is potentially abusable, players could spam attack orders to quickly "drain" a unit's evasion buff. Normaly, you would avoid this with damage detect events, but I'm not sure they fire on missed attacks.

well I think you can also allow illusions to cast abilities, by changing the thing in gameplay constants, "Illusions can cast abilities" search for it

How about the 'image' is a unit with slightly less attribute gain (less dmg) & using the system in Enfos with Double Blader?

Problem with that, spirit_man, is it would only work with heroes. I want the damage reduction to work on units too. And I am not familiar with this Double Blader system. Care to fill me in?

Taur: I looked in gameplay constants and there were a bunch of things you could enable for illusions but abilities was not one of them.

Anyway, I decided to just forget about the damage dealt reduction. Damage taken is enough if I make it pretty heavy. So yeah the abilities work really well together now. By the way, if you're ever looking for a way to cover a unit in a sort of purplish dark cloud, try using the aura of blight model for the buff and attaching it to the head, chest, both hands and both feet. It looks cool.